December ‘17
When I first joined CT in early december 2017 I believed this was the fastest way to get informations regarding crypto related news.
What good is a social media platform with a 280 character limitation for if not for fast, short and information packed news ?
The basic premise of me joinig twitter — which I honestly hated to my guts and tried actively avoiding at all cost — was, if I can get the informations fast enough, I can react to the news accordingly and adjust my trading. Little did I know, this is not how it works.
I spent my first few days on twitter searching for the hashtag #crypto and kept adding accounts with big followings. By my logic: The more people someone were following the more this person must have known.
A grave mistake as I discovered later on.
I found a lot of well known accounts and really believed they knew more than me. Wow, this person joined in 2014 he must most definetly know more than me and look this one has 60 thousand followers — this guy is surely knowledgable.
At some point I even believed they were actively manipulating bitcoin’s price because someone was tweeting „Apologies for the turbulences“ when BTC’s price was tumbling for a short period of time.
As you can see my grand exposure to this new medium caused some really silly misbeliefs.
At some point I was following almost 900 people — the more I followed the better my feed became — at least that’s how my perception of twitter was back then.
When bitcoin topped out and performed an almost 10k pullback in december twitter was in full disbelief. Almost everybody was talking about this being just a minor retracement. Everybody was hyped by this bull run of epic proportion. To be fair it was really difficult back then to stay rational and cash out while every coin around you was making new highs on a daily basis.
January ‘18
In january CT was still talking about 50k and 100k by december and when bitcoin rallied from 9k to 13k I was sufficiently good enough in TA to tell that this was not a real breakout while twitter was flooded with Cup & Handle and Adam & Eve patterns and other silly memes — once again distributed by the big and famous accounts of Cryptotwitter to their followers.
February ‘18
When bitcoin’s price slid down to 6k and bounced, the infamous 33k-by-july-meme became omnipresent. One single account caused mass euphoria and made people believe in something which was never meant to happen in the first place.
I myself was caught up in this utopic make believe prediction. This individual wasn’t the only one prediciting insane prices for BTC by decemeber [current price 3.6k february 2019].
Truth be told, throughout 2018 multiple if not dozens of twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers combined made wild price predictions.
I don’t know how many people were caught up in these irresponsible statements, but I guess there were plenty of them who bought bitcoin and altcoins at insane prices because of that and sold at a loss or even worse are still holding.
March ‘18
Anyway, by march I started questioning these statements because bitcoin’s price was simply going lower and not higher.
For someone who has no idea about technical analysis and what a market cycle is — a social media platform like twitter — can be a very dangerous place for people who blindly follow others and since countless amounts of people were rushing into buying coins in december by just simply hoping to make a quick buck or hoping to get rich quick, certainly got annihilated in the following months.
April/May ‘18
I reduced my following count to 500 people I believed to be more knowledgable than me.
It was this time around I started tweeting my own charts and analysis and started comparing it to what others have been doing. But the more I dug deeper the more I discovered discrepancies between my own analysis and what “they“ have been doing.
A rocket here and a moon emoji there — when bitcoin hit 10k I couldn’t believe my eyes how many people actually tweeted about this being the breakout. We all know by now how it ended….
June — present ‘18
I radically cleansed my following over and over again and still do. Followed new people who I believed once again more trustworthy and unbiased in TA related topics. But not trustworthy in a sense of believing every word they say but more in a sense of they seem to know more than me about TA, crypto and financial markets in general. I was at the point where I trusted no-one. Way too many times I saw this social media specific behaviour occur:
Once price goes up, everybody has apparently smoked a big blunt of hopium and expects price to break out and go to the moon while technicals tell a different story.
Conclusion:
Don’t trust anyone, especially not if there is money involved.
Under no circumstances give your money to an anonymous account for trading and question everyone. If there is money to be made there is certainly someone who is gonna take it all away from you. It may be the market itself, but it can also be a scamming paid group or one of the countless fishing attempts, just remember the Ethereum scam-bots commenting over and over again the same thing and impersonating someone else.
Nevertheless there are good people out there who will try preventing you from doing stupid decisions, you just got to find them.
Let me elaborate shortly:
A hopium fueled chart will always get more attention and likes than a bearish or more rational approach. The human mind is programmed to gravitate towards positivity and cuts out the negativity part completely. As an investor and as a trader, crypto is no different to any other fiancial market. There will always be someone who is gonna try selling you something which is fundamentally false or wrong — it’s called marketing.
I know it can be exhausting and it’s hard to learn, but do your own FA/TA analysis and maybe listen every now and then to the people who are proven to be good guys in this space.
Cryptotwitter is a great place despite all the negative aspects I mentioned above. There is no better and more efficient way to exchange thoughts quickly and receive important informations the fastest possible way. And don’t let us forget the endless stream of shitposts and memes. I have to admit I joined twitter for the news but stayed for the fun and drama.
Things I’ve learned throughout my freshman year on CT:
- Trust your gut and don’t copy other traders
- Don’t follow the masses — Trust your instincts even though the herd goes the other way.
- Question everyone’s opinion and what they’re doing and why
Stay safu
Thank you for your time and reading this article.
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